Activities

Trainings, courses, peer mentoring, seminars and symposiums organized for and by the FIMM PhD students.
Scientific coffee breaks

FIMM Coffee Breaks are an important venue for Doctoral Students and Postdocs to present their research projects and findings to the FIMM staff, to encourage collaborations throughout FIMM and to get much needed practice on the art of presenting. Coffee breaks are organised approximately every other week. 
Presentation guidelines
  • Identify presenters for sessions
  • Send these guidelines out to presenters two weeks in advance
  • During the session keep a timer so that after the allotted 15 minutes of the talk an alarm sounds
  • Use your discretion about how to let the speaker continue
  • If questions were asked during the talk (or they were disturbed/interrupted in other ways), give the speaker a roughly equal amount of time to finish
  • If in the middle of their conclusions, let them finish. After the talk, ask the selected “opponent” to stand, to ask the first questions. Once questions are flowing from the audience, prioritise student questions (safe space for “stupid questions”).
  • Refrain from letting the group leader/senior scientists from the presenters group answer the questions for the presenter. If questions are not forthcoming and the opponent doesn’t have any more questions, be prepared to ask questions of your own.
  • Although the audience is made up of your peers in science, you need to keep these talks generalised, rather than specific and technical. Think about how your work would be presented if written for a popular science article (New Scientist, Tiede, Nature News etc).
  • You only have 15 minutes for your talk, so that we can create discussion afterwards. Stick to your time! A rule of thumb is that on average 1 slide will take 1 minute to present.
  • Present a coherent story based on your research. Don’t try to present your whole thesis. Start with the problem you are trying to solve. Explain how you plan to solve it.
  • If you use something from the “Methods Understanding. List” (below), be sure to give time to explain it, so that the audience understands what has been performed. Present your results.
  • Be specific to those results that answer your questions. Conclude on how the work solves the overall problem, or contributes to solving it in the future.
  • Remember, you are telling your story with the aid of slides, not reading the story from slides. Prioritise using figures to illustrate what you are saying. Avoid using abbreviations (unless standard or gene/protein names).
  • When answering questions it is ok to admit that you do not know the answer. However, you have spent the most time with this research, so offer your opinion.
  • You are selected to ask the first 2-3 questions of the presenter.
  • You can ask about anything in their presentation. If the problem and introduction were unclear, it is fine to go back and ask about those. You are not restricted to only asking about the results. You do not need to try and “catch the presenter out”, just ask the questions you want to ask.

The following have been flagged by the students of FIMM as methods being used by others which they do not generally understand.

Rank and topic

  • 1 Deep learning
  • 2 Neural networks
  • 3 Mendelian randomization
  • 4 Computational phasing
  • 5 Cell Tox Green (CTX/CTxG)
  • 6 Machine learning
  • 7 Flow cytometry
  • 8 Artificial Intelligence (AI)
  • 9 Imputation
  • 10 Principal components analysis (PCA)
  • 11 Chi-square test
  • 12 Regression (logistic + multivariate)
  • 13 Immunohistochemistry
  • 14 False discovery rate (FDR)
  • 15 Genomics Quality Control
  • 16 Western blot
  • 17 Genome wide association study
  • 18 Manhattan plot
  • 19 PCR
  • 20 Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)
FIMM Think different seminars

The "Think Different" seminar series is organized by doctoral students at FIMM. For the series, researchers working on exciting new ideas are invited to give a talk and hopefully encourage the audience to think different.
FIMM annual poster session

FIMM PhD student and Postdoc Council organizes annually a FIMM-wide Poster Session. The Poster Session takes place normally in the autumn.
Social fridays

FIMM PhD student and Postdoc Council organizes a monthly get-together in the form of Social Fridays.

The Social Fridays are currently on a break due to the corona situation, but more information will be available later on.
FIMM peer mentoring

FIMM PhD stu­dents and postdoc­toral re­search­ers sup­port one an­other through peer ment­or­ing

Peer mentoring not only provides opportunities for more experienced PhD students or postdocs to share their knowledge of the system, give feedback, and answer questions, but also helps to establish (professional) contacts that can provide support in different (challenging) situations. Oftentimes, level of seniority is irrelevant in peer mentoring because experiences are varied and simply sharing independent perspectives raises awareness of a diverse array of views and actions.  Since peers do the mentoring, it takes away a possible factor of intimidation that can arise in a typical, hierarchical, academic environment and, importantly, provides a strong sense of community. Added value comes to the mentors who experience what it is to guide and help others.

You are welcome to contact any member of the FIMM PhD student and post doc council and/or the doctoral training coordinator in any issues where you might need peer support and help or if you just need to have a chat. The council also aims to organize trainings and workshops that can be beneficial in tackling the obstacles you might face during your PhD.